That there was some unusual agitation in the town Gilian could gather as soon as he had set foot within the Arches in the early morning. It was in the air, it was mustering many women at the well. There they stood in loud and lingering groups, their stoups running over extravagantly while they kept the tap running, unconscious what they were about Or they had a furtive aspect as they whispered in the closes, their aprons wrapping their folded arms. At the door of the New Inns, Mr. Spencer was laying forth a theory of abduction. He had had English experience, he knew life; for the first time since he had come to this place of poor happenings he had found something he could speak upon with authority and an audience to listen with respect What his theory was, Gilian might have heard fully as he passed; but he was thinking of other things, and all that came to him were two or three words, and one of the errant sentences was seemingly about himself. That attracted all his attention. He gave a glance at the people at the door—the inn-keeper, MacGibbon, with an unusual Kilmarnock bonnet on that seemed to have been donned in a hurry; Rixa, in a great perturbation, having just come out of a shandry-dan with which he had been driving up Glen Shira; Major Paul, and Wilson the writer. The inn-keeper, who was the first to see the lad, stopped his speech with confusion and reddened. They gave him a stare and a curt acknowledgment of his passage of the time of day as the saying goes, looked after him as he passed round Old Islay’s corner, and found no words till he was out of sight.

“That puts an end to that notion, at any rate,” said the Sheriff, almost pleased to find the Londoner in the wrong with his surmises. And the others smiled at Mr. Spencer as people do who told you so. Two minutes ago they were half inclined to give some credit to the plausibility of his reasoning.

The inn-keeper was visibly disturbed. “Dear me! I have been doing the lad an injustice after all; I could have sworn he was the man in it if it was anybody.”

“Pooh!” said Rixa, “the Paymaster’s boy! I would as soon expect it of Gillesbeg Aotram.”

They went into the hostelry, and Gilian, halfway round the factor’s corner, was well-nigh ridden down by Turner on a roan horse spattered on the breast and bridle with the foam of a hard morn’s labour. He had scoured the countryside on every outward road, and come early at the dawn to the ferry-house and rapped wildly on the shutter. But nowhere were tidings of his daughter. Gilian felt a traitor to this man as he swept past, seeing nothing, with a face cruel and vengeful, the flanks of his horse streaked with crimson. The people shrunk back in their closes and their shop-doors as he passed all covered upon with the fighting passion that had been slumbering up the glen since ever he came home from the Peninsula.

It was the breakfast hour in the Paymaster’s. Miss Mary was going in with the Book and had but time to whisper welcome to her boy on the step of the door, for the brothers waited and the clock was on the stroke. Gilian had to follow her without a word of explanation. He was hungry; he welcomed the little respite the taking of food would give him from the telling of a confidence he felt ashamed to share with Miss Mary.

The Paymaster mumbled a blessing upon the vivours, then fed noisily, looking, when he looked at Gilian at all, but at the upper buttons of his coat as if through him, and letting not so little as the edge of his gaze fall upon his face. That was a studious contempt, and Gilian knew it, and there were many considerations that made him feel no injury at it. But the Cornal’s utter indifference—that sent his eye roaming unrecognising into Gilian’s and away again without a spark of recognition—was painful. It would have been an insufferable meal, even in his hunger, but for Miss Mary’s presence. The little lady would be smiling to him across the table without any provocation whenever her brothers’ eyes were averted, and the faint perfume of a silk shawl she had about her shoulders endowed the air with an odour of domesticity, womanhood, maternity.

For a long time nobody spoke, and the pigeons came boldly to the sill of the open window and cooed.

At last said the Paymaster, as if he were resuming a conversation: “I met him out there on horseback; the hunt is still up, I’m thinking.”

“Ay?” said the Cornal, as if he gripped the subject and waited the continuance of the narrative.

“He’ll have ranged the country, I’m thinking,” went on his brother. “I could not but be sorry for the man.”

Miss Mary cast upon him a look he seldom got from her, of warmth more than kinship, but she had nothing to say; her voice was long dumb in that parlour where she loved and feared, a woman subjugate to a sex far less worthy than her own and less courageous.

“Humph!” said the Cornal. He felt with nervous inquiry at his ragged chin, inspired for a second by old dreads of untidy morning parades.

“I had one consolation for my bachelordom in him,” went on the younger brother, and then he paused confused.

“And what might that be?” asked the Cornal.

“It’s that I’m never like to be in the same scrape with a child of mine,” he answered, pretending a jocosity that sat ill on him. Then he looked at Miss Mary a little shamefaced for a speech so uncommonly confidential.

The Cornal opened his mouth as if he would laugh, but no sound came.

“I’m minding,” said he, speaking slowly and in a muffled accent he was beginning to have always; “I’m minding when that same, cast in your face by the gentleman himself, greatly put you about Jock, Jock, I mind you were angry with Turner on that score! And no child to have the same sorrows over! Well—well——” He broke short and for the first time let his eyes rest with any meaning on Gilian sitting at the indulgence of a good morning’s appetite.

Miss Mary put about the breakfast dishes with a great hurry to be finished and out of this explosive atmosphere.

“There was an odd rumour—” said the Paymaster. He paused a moment, looking at the inattentive youth opposite him. He saw no reason to stay his confidences, and the Cornal was waiting expectingly on him. “An odd rumour up the way; I heard it first from that gabbling man Spencer at the Inns. It was that a young gentleman of our acquaintance might have had a hand in the affair. I could not say at the first whether the notion vexed or pleased me, but I assured him of the stupidity of it.” He looked his brother in the eyes, and fixing his attention cunningly dropped a lid to indicate that the young gentleman was beside them.

The Cornal laughed, this time with a sound.

“Lord,” he cried. “As if it was possible! You might go far in that quarter for anything of dare-deviltry so likeable. What’s more, is the girl daft? Her mother had caprice enough, but to give her her due she took up with men of spirit There was my brother Dugald—— But this one, what did Dugald call him—aye! on his very death-bed? The dreamer, the dreamer! It will hold true! Him, indeed!” And he had no more words for his contempt.

All the time, however, Gilian was luckily more or less separate from his company by many miles of fancy, behind the hills among the lochs watching the uprising of Nan, sharing her loneliness, seeing her feet brush the dew from the scented gall. But the Cornal’s allusion brought him to the parlour of his banishment, away from that dear presence. He listened now but said nothing. He feared his very accent would betray his secret.

“I’ll tell you what it is,” said the Cornal again, “whoever is with her will rue it; mind, I’m telling you. It’s like mother like child.”

“I’m glad,” said the Paymaster, “I had nothing to do with the sex of them.” He puffed up as he spoke it; there was an irresistible comedy in the complacence of a man no woman was ever like to run after at his best. His sister looked at him; his brother chuckled noiselessly.

“You—you—you——” said the elder brother grimly, but again he did not finish the sentence.

The meal went on for a time without any speech, finished, and Miss Mary cried at the stair-head for her maid, who came up and sat demurely at the chair nearest the door while the Cornal, as hurriedly as he might, ran over the morning’s sacred exercise from the Bible Miss Mary laid before him. The Paymaster took his seat beside the window, looking out the while and heedless of the Scriptures, watched the fishermen crowding for their mornings into the house of Widow Gordon the vintner. Miss Mary stole glances at her youth, the maid Peggy fidgeted because she had left the pantry door open and the cat was in the neighbourhood. As the old man’s voice monotonously occupied the room, working its way mumblingly through the end of Exodus, conveying no meaning to the audience, Gilian heard the moor-fowl cry beside Little Fox. The dazzle of the sunshine, the sparkle of the water, the girl inhabiting that solitary spot, seemed very real before him, and this dolorous routine of the elderly in a parlour no more than a dream from which he would waken to find himself with the girl he loved. Upon his knees beside his chair while the Cornal gruffly repeated the morning prayer he learned from his father, he remained the remote wanderer of fancy, and Miss Mary knew it by the instinct of affection as she looked at the side of his face through eyelids discreetly closed but not utterly fastened.

The worship was no sooner over than Gilian was for off after Miss Mary to her own room, but the Paymaster stayed him with some cold business query about the farm, and handed him a letter from a low-country wool merchant relative to some old transaction still unsettled. Gilian read it, and the brothers standing by the window resumed their talk about the missing girl: it was the subject inspired by every glance into the street where each passerby, each loiterer at a close mouth, was obviously canvassing the latest news.

“There’s her uncle away by,” said the Paymaster, straining his head to follow a figure passing on the other side of the street. “If they had kept a stricter eye on her from the first when they had her they might have saved themselves all this.”

“Stricter eye!” said the Cornal. “You ken as much about women as I ken about cattle. The veins of her body were full of caprice, that’s what ailed her, and for that is there any remede? I’m asking you. As if I did not ken the mother of her! Man, man, man! She was the emblem and type of all her sex, I’m thinking, wanting all sobriety, hating the thought of age in herself and unfriendly to the same in others. A kind of a splash on a fine day upon the deep sea, laughing over the surface of great depths. I knew her well, Dugald knew her——”

“You had every chance,” said the Paymaster, who nowadays found more courage to retort when his brother’s shortness and contempt annoyed him.

“More chance, of course I had,” said the Cornal. “I’m thinking you had mighty little from yon lady.”

“Anyway, here’s her daughter to seek,” said the Paymaster, feeling himself getting the worst of the encounter; “my own notion is that she’s on the road to Edinburgh. They say she had aye a crave for the place; perhaps there was a pair of breeches there behind her. Anyway, she’s making an ass of somebody!”

Gilian threw down the letter and stood to his feet with his face white. “You’re a liar!” said he.

No shell in any of their foreign battles more astounded the veterans he was facing with wide nostril and a face like chalk.

“God bless me, here’s a marvel!” cried the Cornal when he found voice.

“You—you—you damned sheep!” blurted the Paymaster. “Do you dare speak to me like that? For tuppence I would give you my rattan across the legs.” His face was purple with anger; the stock that ran in many folds about his neck seemed like a garotte. He lifted up his hand as if to strike, but his brother caught his arm.

“Let the lad alone,” said he. “If he had a little more of that in his make I would like him better.”

Together they stood, the old men, facing Gilian with his hands clenched, for the first time in his life the mutineer, feeling a curious heady satisfaction in the passion that braced him like a sword and astounded the men before him.

“It’s a lie!” he cried again, somewhat modifying his accusation. “I know where she is, and she’s not in Edinburgh nor on her way to it.”

“Very well,” said the Paymaster, “ye better go and tell Old Islay where she is; he’s put about at the loss of a daughter-in-law he paid through the nose for, they’re saying.”

The blow, the last he had expected, the last he had reason to look for, struck full and hard. He was blind then to the old men sneering at him there; his head seemed charged with coiling vapours; his heart, that had been dancing a second ago on the wave of passion, swamped and sank. He had no more to say; he passed them and left the room and went along the lobby to the stair-head, where he stood till the vapours had somewhat blown away.